So, here’s my aim. I’m working on a video project for the self-help co-operative ShUSH (Service User Self Help), which will involve a very interesting time for mental health services in Lincoln as a result of the cuts, and the fact we may have the opportunity of taking over the NHS building we have been running our group in for 5+ years. We have for the time being decided on the name of an involvement centre, as it is inclusive of any person that may want to walk through the doors, whilst allowing us to focus on things that will improve peoples health and well-being.

What we need to do is provide evidence that the work we do genuinely helps the community. We also need to put forward peoples voices on what they get out of the group, what people would like to see improved in the group, and where we might see ourselves in a years time.

I’m open to ideas, but at present I’m thinking of providing the video in a series of episodes at http://shush.blip.tv. Keeping with the co-operative/self-help model, it is also a personal objective of mine to create the entire project (or as much as possible) using free and open source software. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it is basically a type of software that isn’t just free download and use, but is also free to take apart, learn from and improved. It is generally created by communities in peoples spare time, occasionally with companies providing money or development time to support the projects. The biggest example of free and open source software is Firefox, created at http://www.mozilla.org.

I feel that open source video editing software like OpenShot Video Editor and PiTiVi Video Editor has matured enough to create professional-quality video productions. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Continued Attempts At Character Modeling in Blender

Here are my continued attempts at creating a character in the 3-D modeling software Blender. My biggest stumbling block, however, was somehow too many vertices were added somewhere… making the task of creating him/her much, much more difficult. I have decided to cut my losses and start again from scratch… however I thought it would be worth posting the final render of my attempt.

This was created using Blender, and based on the tutorial available from here.